My 5 Tips of Sales Management from the view of your subordinate.

1) Never walk into a your first team meeting and feel like you have to set a benchmark then and there as being a hard nosed, aggressive sales manager that wont take any shit and wants immediate results.

There is no quicker way to lose respect, demotivate your team and sign your P45 than this. I have seen this several times, and 2 things always happen. 1) Your good team members leave (and then you end up leaving); 2) you leave. This approach has never EVER worked. In my most recent experience of this, our team were number 1 in the UK & Ireland, and had been for 2 years. Our previous Senior Exec moved up to a more senior role, and our new Senior Exec wanted to leave his mark from day 1. Within 12 months, 4 team members had left (including myself) and the team was 3rd from bottom of the 64 Commercial Centres across UK & Ireland. In my 19+ years of Sales & Business Development, I have never seen a team combust like that before. The benchmark was set… as being quite possibly the worst Senior Exec in history.

2) Don’t forget the importance of praise on its own

Always give praise where it is due, and never double barrel the praise with a ‘feedback sandwich’. Give praise, give feedback, just do not do both when praise is due. From a subordinate point of view, the feedback sandwich (in my career history) did not work unless my line was truly trying to deliver a very difficult message, although most of the time I knew that message was coming anyway. The whole ‘you are amazing, you are not amazing, by the way, you are amazing’ always left me walking away thinking, huh? If someone has been amazing, drag them into the room, high five them, give them a hug (is that still PC?), whatever you feel is appropriate, smile and say ‘wow, amazing, keep it going, ‘cos you are HOT HOT’.

3) Stop focusing on the numbers and more on me and the team

Get to know your customer facing team, as each member is different. Take some time to sit down and impart some invaluable best practice sharing and wider market knowledge. One of the best managers I have had, let me listen to or join in on one of his sales calls/meetings every week as a new starting junior of the team. It helped change my tone and my language (body and verbal), as well as instilling a real respect for him and the work that he did. I was even prouder when he overheard one of my sales calls, and using some of his language he came over, patted me on the back and said, “mate, awesome”. He genuinely loved that I had listened to him well enough to mimic what I thought I could deliver when I spoke to a customer. The figures will come, when your team is firing.

4) Stop allowing the team to sit in the office and make sales calls from the desk

With technology now moving faster than ever, sales people are getting more and more lazy. I appreciate outbound telephony, or overseas sales; these are impossible not to allow (although with Skype & Facetime this is also enabling face to face contact). Those that make the effort to meet the customers face to face win the business, fact. There is nothing more frustrating (when you are doing well) than sitting in a meeting where the whole team is getting the hairdryer treatment for another poor week, when the last 2 months you have seen the vast majority not out of the office. Get on them early. Kick them out of the office, whatever it takes. We all want to see the team doing well.

5) Allow us the time to invest in ourselves

Apart from 1 to 1 sales coaching, allow your team members time to do some professional development. This may include, audio book work, sales professional book reading, training courses; whatever they feel is best. Give them some ideas, but allow the decision to come from them. These professionals are offering genuine expert advice, and yes, whilst this is from the perspective of 1 expert at a time, there just may be something in that book that connects with them. It may also help them understand some part of the sales process better, and whilst there may never be the “magic pill of sales stardom”, it will build confidence and push them to test the new knowledge on customers.

What are your thoughts? Are there tips you feel should make this top 5 but haven’t?.

Dedication, persistence and believing that your product or service is genuinely needed by your customer.

These stats do not surprise me at all. Taking yourself out of the sales person shoes, and into the mind of the customer; would you ever buy a product or service that the person selling it to you didn’t believe in? (unless you actually needed to buy it and do not care what the sales person has to say).

Being persistent in a polite way shows that you actually believe in the product or service enough to continue to develop the sales process further.

If we all started out thinking that we have 12 calls to make to close this sale, achieving 5 is amazing. If we continue to think that 1 call is good enough, we will continue to underachieve.

For the majority of sales people, prospecting and qualifying have always been the least favorite aspects of their jobs.

In the blinkered rush, most sales people, with a new prospect, look purely for a quick sale and qualifying is often skimmed over. Salespeople end up spending time with the wrong people, upsetting a prospect and negatively impacting the effectiveness of the discussion, wasting both theirs and the prospects time.

Qualifying a prospect will make sure that you are not discussing a beautiful Harley Davidson, when the prospect doesn’t have a motorbike licence, and really just looking for a second hand scooter for their son or daughter.

You may be the best closer in the industry, have the gift of the gab, or know exactly when the customer is ready to buy, but without a prospect in front of you, and a steady pipeline for you to work with, all those sales development assets are useless.

Who is a prospect?

Absolutely everyone, until of course you have qualified them.

Qualifying Your Prospects

How can sales professionals qualify and select the right prospects with whom to spend their valuable time?

Salespeople must have the right mindset to find and qualify the prospective client. I would recommend thinking like a physician, and asking questions to diagnose your customers situation. Using qualifying models like BANT (Budget, Authority, Needs & Time), ANUM (Authority, Need, Urgency, Money) and Hubspots latest GPCTBA/C&I, you can get a good flavour as to whether or not the prospect is qualified for your product and solution or you are wasting each others time. What makes a physician’s repertoire of questions so valuable is that it helps you focus on being able to get to the heart of the issue very quickly. Physician’s generally lead with the opening question, “Why are you here today?”, or “How can I help you today?”. Both questions are open ended and will get straight to the heart of the matter.

Qualifying through research is also an excellent way of understanding your prospects. It builds an external profile, for example, size of company, industry, number of employees, structure, mission & what the company is about. Thus helping you to visualise how your products and services could fit. Although there is only so much researching your customers external profile can do for you and your ability to forge a new and lasting relationship with the prospect.

Qualifying a prospect does not guarantee you are going to get the sale, but it does guarantee that you will be more effective with your product or service placement.

If you would like to find out more on qualifying a lead, maybe some sample questioning around models like BANT or others, please contact me at daniel@oursalesexperience.com.

In some of my many new customer meetings working as a SME Portfolio Manager, coming into contact regularly with poor service levels, I want to elaborate a little further on this point with…

My top 10 Sales Person frustrations:

Going into a shop and getting no acknowledgment by the sales person (s) (with a worse point that they are chatting between each other and don’t offer any assistance).

Having a sales person hover, telling me every 2 seconds, that is great, that looks amazing, that is a best seller etc… Space Invader.

A salesperson deciding that the phone call is more important than the sale. (I don’t mind being asked, but it is just staggeringly rude to be cut off and left while the phone is answered).

A salesperson who asks questions, but doesn’t listen and asks you again and again…

A salesperson making a time, and then turning up late without any sort of kindly telephone call or email. Appreciate we are busy people, but I am buying from you? Or was…

Poor and impolite emails or letters.

A salesperson who does not accept responsibility, and blames everyone else, even their boss.

Having an action agreed with a salesperson and then no follow up, no apology, nothing.

When they look untidy or unpresentable. I am someone that does not shave all the time, but there is a difference between presentable and unpresentable.

They have No idea about the product or services they are selling. First dayers I can accept and will happily work with if they honestly highlight it, but anyone else…

What are your thoughts? Do you have a top 10 sales frustrations? Feel free to email me at daniel@oursalesexperience.com with your comments and I will post the top ten on our facebook site. The best thing is, that these frustrations are all so easy to fix. These are truly the basics and most businesses, especially the smaller ones, just seem to be getting it wrong, time and time again. We should be trying to make the experience memorable. Stay tuned for my tips on how to solve these frustrations in upcoming blogs.

“The experience delivered today, will generate the income for tomorrow”.

Helping put a financial story across in a non-judgemental financial world

The Non-Judgemental Toolbox

What do you need?

Most small businesses I meet believe that an extensive Business Plan will help in getting financial support.

Whilst this in some ways is true, probably 90% of the information you have collated is defunct with a financial business that is purely centred on mitigating risks.

Most new business lending is centred purely on whether or not you can provide any information at all rather than the length of the plan you have put together.

The Small Business Manager will very rarely have the authority to make any form of judgemental decision on the business banking account, but will more than likely need to submit documents to their credit control team to reinforce the non-judgemental decision that the system has made.

What I have attached below, will speed up the process of a decision, simplifying your bank managers role as all the information he needs to submit is neatly gathered together, which, given that they are extremely busy people, will give your lending proposal more chance of getting completed (and submitted) over any other lending requests they have received.

For any business lending between £1k – £30k I would recommend putting together:

The 2 Page Proposal

Business Background

What is your business, what sector are you trading in, and what is your unique selling point/competitive advantage

If you have a website, include the link.

How will you make it successful?

Who you are and what is your experience – Highlight similar business management experience, or previous successful business experience.

How much debt do you need?

Iterate how this will be spent down to the final £

Do not include your wage or utilities. This is purely to come out of the business expenses when functioning.

If it is for an asset, put down that you want asset backed finance (HP/Lease etc)

How will you repay the debt?

Where will the income come from?

Is it from sales expected?

How can you prove that?

Include a personal Asset & Liability Statement if you can:

Asset = car, cash, shares, boat, house etc

Liabilities = Debts outstanding

Personal Income = current monthly income – bills

How much is your stake?

Generally any financial provider does not want to take on all the risk. Most banks like 50/50 split.

Most finance house want to see a decent deposit (30%)

Most private financiers also like to see that your family and friends are backing you on this too.

Cash Flow forecast

They are not expecting you to put it to the pence, but if they ask you a question about your figures, you need to know how you came to it. And saying that you just guessed what it will be is not really enough.

Worst case scenario is great, but this does not mean making your business hugely unprofitable, as why would anyone want to lend to a business that couldn’t afford to pay you back.

Any Other Important points

Attach a summarised form of the last 2 years trading accounts if you have them

Other important points you feel may make a difference to the decision, ie long standing personal customer

If you need any assistance in putting this piece together please do not hesitate to contact us directly via email daniel@oursalesexperience.com, via the website at www.oursalesexperience.com or via mobile on 07797787389.

Our Sales Experience is a team of professionals with a passion for delivering excellent customer service. We have a diverse range of industry experience but any good salesperson will tell you, the process is inherently the same for any product or service. It is the delivery, management and ongoing support that will set you apart from the rest.

Why do we do it?

We want to inspire customer facing people to be passionate about the brand they work for and the products or services they sell. We want to lead from the front and bring our passion for business, and our passion for people to help your business deliver a memorable experience over several sales channels.

Where are we based?

Based in Jersey, but we will be working predominantly with you within your place of work. We will be taking on your brand name, researching your products or (and) services and coming with you or working alongside you to deliver the “hands on approach” we promised.

What do we do?

We are an end to end sales & service company that helps small and medium sized businesses engage better with their customers at varying touch points. By touch points I mean on email or phone, in store, anywhere that you interact with your customer other than online.

How can we achieve it?

We have developed a winning process or guideline, that is not as generic as you will find reading sales handbooks. It is a bespoke product which incorporates a lengthy and hugely successful sales & customer service experience history, centering on your customer and their needs.

What next?

We would love to hear from you! Have a question or a new idea? Let’s talk. We love hearing about exciting concepts. Let us know and we will come up with a professional service that can help you develop your sales channels. We are here also to answer any questions you may have about our company or services.